“I am trying to tell you in a foreign language / What everybody knows at home,” explains Destiny Birdsong. “I may well have been a worthless / Child, but my mother kept it to herself.” Out of violence and loneliness, in a sequence of elegies, she writes toward a place to belong.
“Look how far / a name can travel, borne by a brown body,” writes Patrick Rosal, weaving family history, far-flung places, word origins, new myths, enduring injustice, hunger, streets, and relentless blossoming. “The horses snorted down from the hills’ / crests with no one but her to witness // how a steed mid-gallop flops over so fast / and so hard it opens like a rose.”
Tired of prison, a failed muse tries to draft a letter of apology to her parole board. “For the record,” she writes, “I never was a god. I am / spirit same as you, / moving body to body / through the years.” By Tomás Q. Morín.
“I believe in Music, / maker of all that, though / never quite, is as that / which was should have been.” H.L. Hix‘s Lo-Fis loop “what does not happen there” and what did not happen here, making much of what’s not quite.
“Don’t explain. It was an honor // to have been your goat, small / brained and hungry, your wind // advertising all it touched.” A beautiful new poem of art, love, and insufficiency from Jenny Browne.
“Sliced in half, / I hold this rolling sound, / this heart shaking off / its hinges,” Jane Wong writes, shuffling, arranging, seeking connections. “The small heat of my arm nestles / in among the pines.”
“We are in a great dying,” Robin Beth Schaer writes to her infant son, pulled by love for him into the the history of a world in decline. “Intricacies / of milk and sleep dismantle me. I empty / myself into you, hollowing by the ounce. // There are seven white rhinos when you are born. / A year later, six.”
“look at what the lord has made. / above Missouri, sweet smoke.” Danez Smith scripts heartbreaking films of racism, violence, anger, grief, endurance, and love, concluding, “I believe when a person dies / the black lives on.”
“No skull stays silent. Each spills its neglects.” In a brilliant new sequence of sonnets, Paisley Rekdal tries, in a time of war, to find voices for the abandoned skulls unearthed on the grounds of the Colorado State Mental Institution.
“What did her eyes that gleamed with the glow of extinguished silver see as she was peering into the afterlife?” In this translation from Fady Joudah, Amjad Nasser turns his dying mother’s prayer for him–”May God light your way”–into a meditation on the nature of light itself, wondering all the while, “Is remembering my mother a pretext to write about Noor/Dao, or is writing about them a pretext to remember my mother?”